Thank you for your question. Not many people are smart enough to ask if
“the coconut is like a cow or a goat.”

The coconut is a rather large animal, referred by the captain of the USS
Enterprise space vessel as "Dribble". It is rather round, about the size
of a human baby's head, and has brown fur which is somewhat rough in
texture, but pretty; and, after all, it does keep it warm. The coconut
has a sweet face, with two eyes and a mouth. They are arboreal
creatures, and always live up high in trees that have no foliage for the
first 25 feet, and have fan-like foliage at the tops, or they live on
the ground beneath those strange and ugly trees. They can't run but they
can roll like nothin' you've ever seen. They are shy beings, and don’t
have much to say.

Milking them seems rather brutal. You need a Phillips head screwdriver
and a stout hammer. Place the coconut in a vise, with its sweet little
face looking up at you. Poise the screwdriver on one of its cute little
eyes, and strike the handle of the screwdriver with the business end of
the hammer. You have to hit it pretty hard. If you do it correctly, you
will hear it squish and the screwdriver will go into the coconut's
brain. Withdraw the screwdriver, and poise it above the other eye
("jeepers, creepers, where'd ya get those peepers?") and slam it with
the hammer again. Gently remove the coconut from the clutches of the
vise and carry it to the kitchen. [Most of us do not have vises in our
kitchens – they are normally used in the garage workshop area.] [The
thing we have in our kitchens is a "vice" which means an addiction to
something, for example, food.]

Holding the coconut over a bowl, turn it so that its sweet little face
is toward the bowl. Tip it, so that the milk within can pour out of one
eye socket, while the other eye socket admits an equal amount of air
(equal to the amount of milk that comes out). At the point at which the
coconut has been milked to its capacity, your trusty hammer can give it
a few more love pats and the flesh of the coconut is revealed. With a
prying instrument (a small tire iron will do), the lovely white flesh
can be separated from the coconut's furry pelt, whereupon it can be
grated.

If, on the other hand, you, in the manner of a Buddhist, are averse to
causing injury to living creatures, you can buy coconut milk in cans at
the grocery store in the Asian section. For our gatherings, about twice
each year, we serve Rijstaffel which requires a great amount of coconut
milk. Joanne found 96 oz cans of it and bought 3. The first one I opened
appeared to have a little rather hard substance at the top. Rather hard
– sheesh! - it was very hard. I had to get a small crow-bar to pry it
loose from the inside of the can. With the assistance of my immense
partner, the can was emptied into a large pot. The "crust" was actually
four inches thick. It melted nicely with heat, and it proved to me that
coconut milk is extremely fat-laden, and it is no wonder that it was
capable of nourishing those few humans who were not cannibals and were
able to break them. I had always believed that the herbivorous humans
had died at the hands of cannibals, but perhaps the coconuts took their
revenge by issuing mass quantities of bad cholesterol.

~^~^~^~^~

After all this, I have learned that the liquid that comes out of the
coconut is
coconut juice; coconut milk is made by steeping grated coconut in whole
milk, then straining it, pressing hard to get all the liquid. Oops!

We publish two newsletters a couple of times a month. To
subscribe, send a blank email to the appropriate email address. Topica
will send you a message asking if you really intended to subscribe - just click
reply - that's it!